With Friends Like These...

So Larry Lucchino, president and CEO of the defending world champion Boston Red Sox, came to speak at Calhoun yesterday. He said a lot of interesting things, but what struck me the most were his thoughts about payroll disparities in baseball. We aren't talking about a minor phenomenon here: Alex Rodriguez makes more money than the entire Florida Marlins roster combined, and the Yankees roster in total makes only slightly less money than the rosters of the Nationals, Pirates, A's, Rays, and Marlins put together. Revenue sharing has helped the situation somewhat - while the Yankees are still far and away the most profligate spenders, there are now 12 teams with payrolls between $138m and $98m, ranging from big-market teams (Red Sox, Mets) to small-market ones (Blue Jays). But the problem with revenue sharing is that it lacks an accompanying salary floor. The opposite of a salary cap, a salary floor is a minimum amount of money which must be spent on player salaries. It is designed to make sure that teams actually take their revenue sharing checks and put them to their intended use (i.e. paying players) instead of siphoning off the money into the owners' bank accounts and continuing to field a cheap, mediocre team.

On its face, a salary floor seems like a good idea, and one would assume that the players' union would be behind it - after all, unions have long championed minimum wage laws, which is basically the concept behind a salary floor (albeit applied to the collective wages of all players, not to each individual). Surprisingly, though, the players' union is vehemently opposed to a salary floor. The rationale, at least according to Lucchino, is that the union opposes any attempt to regulate salaries at all, fearing that it would be the first step on the road to salary caps (either for a team or for individual players).

Basically, the players' union is allowing its irrational fear of a slippery slope of regulation to dominate its thinking, resulting in a situation where the Marlins can field a team with an average salary of about $650,000 while the average Yankee makes just over 10 times that much. Is it just me, or does this scenario run counter to the raison d'etre of unions? Unions are supposed to look out for all of their members, not just the powerful ones. Instituting a salary floor does not necessarily mean that a salary cap is coming, and even if it did, why would the union give preferential treatment to the elite players (whose exorbitant salaries would be reined in somewhat by a cap) instead of the average players (whose low salaries would be increased by a salary floor)?

The free market may be good for some things, and it may allow certain individuals to reap enormous rewards, but it is emphatically not an egalitarian system - the strong survive, and the weak are trampled down. Unions are, at their core, supposed to be a way to counterbalance these Darwinian tendencies. Maybe someone should tell the MLB players' union this...